Many people, Christian and otherwise, know about the message and teaching of Christmas. Yes, it is well known and accepted that love is the message of the newborn baby in a manger in faraway Bethlehem, and this message has been preached, acted out, and sung about in numerous countries and civilisations throughout the world. Somehow, it is perhaps due to this message spoken of and written about ad nauseam, it also does have a negative effect - it has also ignored and sidestepped the crucial message of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. I am referring to the importance of being welcoming to the stranger.
In the Old Testament, there were so many prophets who spoke emphatically about how imperative it was to welcome the stranger or the foreigner. After all, the Israelites were a displaced people, and they themselves were always seeking a home for their people. They were so familiar with the experience of being a stranger or a foreigner, and in his own life, Jesus stood side by side with the prophets from of old.
For Jesus, God not only had a preferential option for the poor. In Jesus, God was in the poor! And his message to both his disciples and his followers was to always have a space in their hearts and lives for orphans, widows, lepers and strangers. This was such an affront to the Pharisees who were only keen to keep the strict laws of Moses. They confronted Jesus numerous times for dining with public sinners and even tax collectors. To the Pharisees, this would inevitably sully and stain the very being of a righteous Jew. Jesus’ well-quoted retort to them was that the healthy do not need the attention and care of a doctor, but it is the sick who do. All of humanity was sick in their souls due to the sin of Adam, also called original sin. Jesus came as a doctor of the soul to assuage this malignancy through his willingness to die on the cross of Calvary in the most shameful and despicable way.
It is so telling that in the 25th chapter of St Matthew’s gospel, Jesus teaches his disciples about the last judgment, and how the people will be like either sheep or goats. What Jesus will judge is the way we either gave food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, or how we welcomed strangers who came to us while we were alive.
Those that will be sent into the eternal fire will be those that failed to give food to the hungry, provide water to the parched, and those who gave no welcome and those who did not visit those who were in prison. The clincher is at the end, when Jesus reveals “what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.”
Knowing this can be very disconcerting for those who hail Jesus as Lord, King, Saviour and Messiah. How real Jesus was to us will be judged if we have indeed seen him in the sick, the poor, the marginalised, and the despised. This Jubilee Year is one where the late Pope Francis calls us to give not just hope, but ‘spes nonconfundit.’ In our common parlance, it means ‘hope does not disappoint.’
We need to train our eyes and hearts to be able to see and perceive Christ who is very much present in those we naturally tend to avoid and side-step in life. Our baptism needs to be seen as a day when our eyes were opened in a new way to see life anew.
There are many people in the world who are either refugees or facing immigrant issues. Many are facing humongous humanitarian crises, and as Christians, we cannot be too quick to turn away from their needs and not see their need.
Undoubtedly, facing these rejects of society is a highly sensitive and it would be naive to think that these are not complex issues to deal with. Of course, dealing with them will impact us politically, socially, economically and will have an effect on our security issues too. But what is so important is that there is no way we can justify our lack of positive response on Christian grounds. Yes, Jesus had a divine heart to love all sinners so as to die on Calvary for us. We need to pray for a change of heart, so that like Jesus, we too can, on our own cross on Calvary, be able to say - “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
